Video-Game Narration and Visual Stylization
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School of Arts of University College Ghent Master thesis Video-game narration and visual stylization Pavel Týbl, graphic design Mentors: Stijn van Rossem Bert Balcaen Gent, 2014 1 Table of Contents 1. Introduction....................................................................................................................3 2. Game narration introduction..........................................................................................4 3. History of the narration in video games........................................................................ 6 4. The strength of video game narration............................................................................ 7 5. The linear story............................................................................................................ 11 6. Ways to tell a video game story................................................................................... 13 6.1 Cut scenes............................................................................................................. 14 6.2 Text and dialogue.................................................................................................. 15 6.3 Environment..........................................................................................................16 7. Game visuals introduction........................................................................................... 18 8. Art director...................................................................................................................19 9. Stylization.................................................................................................................... 22 9.1 By Technology...................................................................................................... 22 9.2 By artistic technique..............................................................................................23 9.3 Color spectrum......................................................................................................23 9.4 Content/story based...............................................................................................24 9.4 Personal style........................................................................................................ 24 10. Conclusion................................................................................................................. 24 Bibliography.................................................................................................................... 26 2 1. Introduction In my practical master's project I work on a simple platform video-game called Platitude Route. Its story is my personal take on growing up, adulthood and chasing your childhood dreams. It is a video-game describing 5 days in a life of a boy, whose birthday is coming, and who is trying to fulfill his dreams before he becomes an adult. In this theoretical part of the project, I would like to add some of the theory and thoughts that helped me to create the game and gave my work a direction. My “artistic background” lies in graphic design, so my way of thinking about the game itself is from the graphic design point of view. And by that I do not mean only all the attention that I give to the way the game looks. I mainly consider how the game's visual presentation can be used as a part of the whole “system” which is telling the player what is going on in the game, where to go and how to play. How can I use all the audiovisual tools that the game medium offers to transfer some kind of information or thought to the player. The same approach as if I were designing a poster or a CD booklet. For this reason I design my game as a simple platformer – similar to Mario or Sonic games, but without any traditional “game” elements – like enemies, score, or Win/Lose mechanisms. I design it more as an “explorative” game, where the player advances through the game and by examining the game audiovisual presentation discovers the story and the meaning of the game. Because I focus mainly on the game narrative and the game visuals rather then the “gameplay” I prefer calling Platitude Route an “interactive short story”. I avoid any more complex or sophisticated game mechanisms, because it is too difficult for me. Just to design a video game level so it is not too difficult or too easy is a work for experienced game designer, which I am not. So I focus on searching the possibilities how to tell a good story and how to use the video game medium. I do not want to design a game to only kill some time with. But rather create something meaningful and even find out if it is possible to use video game medium artistically. In this thesis I plan to summarize the theoretical foundations of my practical project and my ideas and reflections on the video game aspects that are the most important for me – the way a video-game can tell a story, what is the video game visuals and how is it created. I want to elaborate on the current state of video game industry, remark some recent events that I feel prove some of my own, or generally accepted 3 views, and compile the knowledge that I used to determine how to try to make my own game as well as possible. I chose this topic, because I am really passionate about video games. Not only as a consumer however. I love when a game is unique, when it tells a moving story, when it has great, relatable characters or when it looks stunning. I always like to think about how a game achieved its success or why a certain game was not interesting for me. And last but not the least, I chose this topic, because I have always wanted to create a video- game and find a way to use the medium in my own way, to express my own ideas and feelings. Even after several decades of video-game existence I still feel like their potential is not fully utilized and I believe it is important to try to find new approaches and ways to work with video-games. In this thesis I will be exploring the video-game narration and its history, specifics and different approaches to it by different developers. I will also try to investigate how much work goes into the video-game visual presentation and how it can be utilized, other than just a “pretty packaging of the game mechanics”. For all of that I will be using specialized literature, news reports of some of the important game industry related evens and also a personal meeting with experienced developer from a Disney Mobile Game Studio in Prague Marvin Hill. I write the thesis in a way that anybody can understand the terms – even if they do not usually play games – but at the same time I keep it as informative and precise as possible. 2. Game narration introduction Video games, as a fairly new medium, face a lot of doubts and questions. People do not know the medium well enough to be able to judge all the possibilities that video- games can bring – to the creator as well as to the consumer. People love telling and listening to stories. We spend so much time talking to our friends about what happened today at a train station. We watch tens or hundreds of hours of TV series, telling stories with fictional characters. We read books, we visit cinemas, we text each other... all of this just to pass on a story. So I think it is only natural that game developers are finding ways how to tell a story in video-games as well. What can we define as a story in a video-game? What are the ways used to tell the story? The most obvious answer right now, when we look at the story of the best 4 selling games of the video game industry, would probably be something like this: the story creates the background for the actions of the player. It gives the motivation to the non-playable characters (NPCs) players meet in the game. And it creates logic and sense in the way game levels or missions are structured in the game. And the main ways of telling the story are cutscenes (short animated scenes, which player watches between levels), interactive dialogues (a conversation between NPCs and the player, where player can choose his responses) or just plain text. That answer might satisfy some, but I think we can go much deeper than that, especially when we start focusing on other game genres and ways the player can experience a game. What I described in the previous paragraph might describe a lot of the big and well known games from past years – from a simple, linear shooters like Call of Duty to big, story-driven RPGs like Mass Effect. But because a video-game is not a movie or a book, but much more a set of components and rules1, we can't forget that a lot of games are able to tell different kind of story in other ways. Let me mention games like The Sims, where the player controls a character through everyday tasks and by trying to fulfill his needs and desires plays through a different story every time he plays. We can also discuss the stories that a player witnesses while playing a massively multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft, or Eve online. And because the basic principle of these games is, that there are thousands of people involved, no one can ever predict what is going to happen – like a huge space battle between two hostile player groups in Eve online2, that involved thousands of players and lasted for several hours. If we think about a game as a set of components and rules, do games even need a story? There is huge number of games that do not have a story, games that focus only on gameplay, games that used to be played in the arcade and recently moved into your phones